Sardan

Black_Strike,

I hope you're still reading this thread. Please listen, I don't have much time. Do not fall for their lies. They're doing their normal razzle-dazzle "supply and demand" crap. You and I both know that purple recipes sell for 5K if you sell them at a store. That's their true worth. The only reason they sell for more is manipulation by the ebil marketeer cabal!

.... OMG, a black truck just pulled up outside of my house. I think they've found me. Black_Strike please listen to me before it's too la

Surely you're joking. I have a pretty high end PC with a fast internet connection, and the "valley of lag" in the 3rd mission is infamous. It's also common to get bad lag on the towers at the end of the final mission. It doesn't seem to be a client issue, as it hits all players simultaneously.

Let me hasten to add that I'm the guy that posted practically a love sonnet to the ITF in the forums a couple of months ago. It's far and away my favorite TF, but it does have quite serious issues with lag. The lag in the valley in the 3rd mish is completely avoidable, however, so overall it tends not to be a big issue.

Of course in i16 that won't be an issue.

So that's very good news!

Note that he says "should" make it in before i16 goes live; he can't control exactly when it'll go live because it has to wend its way through QA.

It's just my subjective impression. I could be wrong. *shrug*

I don't think anyone would dispute that.

I typically run one or two TFs per night, almost always with PuGs. I'm just going by my own subjective experiences. I recall seeing people doing many KHTF runs back to back. Then they implemented DR, and that dried up. (Not just KH, which had its rewards nerfed to hell, but in general.) I rarely see people, even after a sub-30 minute ITF run say stuff like "you guys are great, let's log on our alts and do it again." I'm not asserting it never happens, just that it's uncommon.

EDIT: IMO a big contributing factor to this behavior is that merits aren't transferable. Earning 200 merits spread over 4 alts is less desirable for that player that wants to buy a LotG than having 200 merits on a single alt.

Honestly I'm not sure why you've waited till i16 to fight this fight. The forums were full of drama and these types of arguments when DR for TFs was first introduced. The fight is over. The DR timer was eventually adjusted to 18 hours so that people didn't have to micromanage exactly what time of night they did a TF, which is a nice touch. But it's not going anywhere. Feel free to passionately advocate for your beliefs, but honestly that fight is long over.

Do you have to turn off the lights and look in a mirror to do that right, or is that only for Hickman?

No, DR for merits has been completely successful. While you may decide to run several ITFs in a row with your stable of 50s, the fact is that most players focus on a single character at a time. Because of that we don't see the rampant TF farming that happened with the KHTF.

What was aggravating was the 24 hour timer. The 18 hour timer means that you can do aTF daily if you want and not have to be super-careful about precisely when you finished the last one.

I'm still chuckling at the phrase "post-death foomph". Come on, everyone, say it out loud! "Post-death foomph". Hehehehe, HAHAHAHAHA.

........ Wow, I did NOT get enough sleep last night.

You rock. Updating the wiki falls into that "teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime" groove.

Well, my bad. I thought you were being sarcastic and I apologize. Mea culpa.

EDIT: OK, I can see you were just being a jerk from your similarly "sincere" post in the i16 beta forum:

So if the timer is NOT 18 hours, /bug it!

I gotta admit I have Nova envy. I would do Blizzard and the the bad guys would flop for a while then not get up, and the team would kinda look around and go "hmm, weren't there more of them a few seconds ago?" Then later a teammate would Nova and there'd be a moment of stunned silence then applause. Nova may not be the most damaging nuke but makes a hell of an impression.

One of you is mistaken.

I don't agree with your conclusions. My characters that run non-AE content get salvage drops that they then sell for hefty amounts of Inf. This makes getting SOs trivial. This also allows them to bank inf for later purchase of recipes/salvage.

The current high prices of salvage are purely due to AE players who refuse to cash in tickets for salvage. The market is working. They're voting with their wallets. They'd rather get inexpensive recipes and then deal with expensive salvage. I expect we'll see a fall in salvage price as i16's new difficulty options and SSK system draw some folks out of the AE. And we'll see prices plummet to pre-AE levels when Going Rogue goes live as most players will be out of the AE entirely for a while.

If the price of salvage is truly a problem, the devs could make it purchasable at a store as you advocate, or they could reduce the number of tickets required for common and uncommon salvage rolls. Neither solution would particularly bother me, although I don't think either is necessary.

Sadly, I think you're right. I believe someone previously pointed out that the time between CoV announce and launch was also > 12 months. I don't know if it was a full 18 months, but the point is that it certainly wouldn't be without precedent.

I vaguely recall this but for some reason I thought it didn't make it in game. Can anyone verify the exact value? Where's Fleeting_Whisper when you need him?

My SS/Shield defense is my current go-to villain. Yes, the rage crash sucks. The reason I didn't recommend SD was that it underperforms when slotted with just SOs or generic IOs. It's an absolute beast if you can afford the set bonuses for soft-capping its defense, but given the OP's budget restrictions I think he'd be better off with WP.

To the OP, what's great about Shields from a real min-max standpoint is that Against All Odds (AAO) buffs your damage while debuffing opponent damage, and Shield Charge is a very high damage PBAoE attack. So Shields helps pour on the damage.

If you're very patient, you can work your Shields brute up from "meh" to godhood, but you'll be outperformed from 1-50 by a WP brute until you can really pimp out your Shielder.

EDIT: I wanted to add that as a solo player that intends to eventually farm you've picked a good time to start a Brute. Well before you ding 50 i16 will be live, allowing you to set your missions for 8 players. A brute really shines compared to a scrapper when at the aggro cap surrounded by a ton of minions, all working to build his Fury. Against small numbers of opponents where it's hard to build and maintain Fury, Scrappers do more damage.

We don't really know if you can bring your inf with you when you cross over, do we? Has any dev confirmed that? If they did, that's as good as admitting the currencies (and markets) will be merged. It makes sense to me, but I could imagine them saying "when you cross over you lose all your inf." Which would royally suck, but I could see it happening.

You hold the world for ransom and demand one million dollars!

Interestingly, the new WoW expansion is using more of something they call "phasing". It basically allows you to see the results of your actions in the game world, but other players in the zone with you won't see it. I expect this is hard to do, but I think it's heralding what will eventually be an important advance in MMOs. With phasing, you might for example destroy a villain's hideout and see that the building is now rubble, but other players who haven't done that arc see it as whole and untouched.

Assuming CoH lives for a few more years, it's something I'd love to see introduced to this game.

I think the market has already spoken. By that I mean most MMOs already have this type of mechanism. Even NCsoft's latest, Aion, has a means to transfer items between characters. I know the fact that other games have it doesn't make it inherently the right thing to do, but it clearly invalidates the argument that having it would ruin the game.